This week, it was a computer glitch that caused chaos at Qantas.
It wasn’t the only airline affected by the IT problem, which also grounded the planes of some competitors.
Yet it was Qantas who fielded the public flak for failing to manage the “nightmare queues” that resulted. There was a queue from Melbourne airport’s Qantas domestic terminal that reached as far as the international terminal. As stranded passengers tried to frantically rebook flights, it was the Qantas service desk that was overwhelmed.
If there’s one word you don’t want to marry to your brand in the anxious, emotional world of the commercial passenger experience, it’s “chaos”. Yet chaos has come to define the passenger experience of Australia’s once-vaunted national carrier, as well as to offer a textbook lesson in corporate unaccountability and the failures of privatisation.
Once upon a time, Qantas’s reputation for quality was such that it drove a major plot point in a Hollywood movie. In 1988’s Rain Man, Tom Cruise is obliged to drive his autistic brother on a life-changing journey across America because the only airline Dustin Hoffman’s character will fly is the matchless – and unavailable – Qantas. So shamed were other airlines by the comparison, they used to cut the key scene when the film played on their inflight entertainment.
Local audiences cheered the scene when that movie came out. These days one imagines the same locals erupting in harrumphs, or throwing their boots at the screen.
Because if it’s not queues from IT glitches at Qantas, it’s queues from delayed baggage transfers, cancelled flights, a lack of staff, a generalised, spiralling cluelessness that drives operational dysfunction and frustration. This publication reported that as many as one in 10 pieces of luggage every day are either getting lost or not being loaded on to Qantas domestic flights at Sydney airport.
A spokesperson for Qantas said this claim was “completely inaccurate” but has declined to provide its own figures on mishandled baggage.
Understandably, frequent flyers are not risking lost hold luggage and are travelling with carry-on items, for which there is not enough room on packed flights. It transforms every Qantas boarding experience into a game that combines sardines and Tetris in the worst, most unpunctual way.
Since becoming Qantas CEO in 2008, Alan Joyce has distinguished himself in the Australian corporate community for the brutal enthusiasm with which he’s engaged corporate tactics at the company. It was Joyce who infamously stranded thousands of Qantas passengers around the world in 2011 when he grounded the entire fleet in a fit of pique at an industrial dispute.
Nevermind that it was not aggressive industrial policy but – as Alan Kohler pointed out at the time – a drop in fuel prices that funded Qantas’s profit in dire trouble’s wake. Joyce was named “most influential business leader” of that year by The Australian and, sadly, notoriety seemed to encourage him.
During the pandemic the grounding of airlines saw Qantas receive $2bn of bailout money from the then Morrison government.
The government demanded no equity in exchange for its largesse, and Qantas management gave no reassurances, either – not about jobs, routes, services or quality. While milking the taxpayer teat for two-thirds of the value of the company, Qantas management did not maintain jobs.
Instead, they sacked its unionised ground staff, exploiting a “window of opportunity” when workers weren’t physically at work and therefore unable to bargain. In late 2019 they unlawfully sacked 2,000 baggage handlers, cleaners, aircraft towing crews and other ground crew whose professionalism is now so desperately missed.
The money was instead spent on crushing Qantas’s competition. The company replaced its fleet of planes, bought out a potential rival, undercut another rival, actively lobbied the government to withhold bailouts for Virgin, and spent what was left on funding the legal cost of their unlawful behaviour and paying out lush executive bonuses.
So if you’re wondering why Qantas seems unbothered by customer outrage at its poor product offering, understand that crushing rivals allows Qantas management to run our once proud national airline without the threat of competition obliging the company to lift standards. Emboldened, management have doubled down against the staff, cancelling staff agreements as a bargaining tactic to cut wages and also cutting wages by using a “sign on bonus” after threatening to put people on minimum awards.
Dare I ask: what do we expect? Those with rosy, Rain Man recollections of the Qantas brand need to be reminded that the airline was privatised between 1992 and 1995. It was a mistake made by the Hawke-Keating Labor government and one that the Albanese Labor government should heed whenever corporate raiders suggest a critical piece of national infrastructure go on sale.
Because the corporate mission of Qantas isn’t anything so twee as to “transport people” or things or “facilitate the service of travel”. The first line of their strategy is: “To achieve top quartile Total Shareholder Returns (TSR) relative to the ASX 100 and global airline peers.”
Unsurprisingly, calls for the re-nationalisation of Qantas are growing. Waiting for another delayed flight, in an oversized queue, Australians are lining up to join them.
• Van Badham is a Guardian Australia columnist. She provides occasional communications services to various Australian trade unions
• This article was amended on 2 August 2022 to correct a reference to IT problems affecting the industry. Virgin Australia was not affected by the glitch as a previous version stated.
